Month: April 2007

[Megan] Daniel Davies and I have been at loggerheads over the Burnham et. al. studies of Iraq casualties published in the Lancet last fall.  So it’s probably no surprise that I think his imagination is running away with him on this:

Really rather shameful. Riyadh Lafta, one of the co-authors of the Johns Hopkins/Lancet studies on excess deaths in Iraq, has been refused a transit visa for his flight to Vancouver to make a presentation on alarming increases in child cancer. He was apparently meant to be passing on some documentation to some other medical researchers who are going to write a paper with him on the subject; the presentation was happening in Vancouver because Dr. Lafta had already been refused a visa to visit the USA.

What on earth can be in this data? Presumably the UK and US authorities have reasoned that Dr Lafta is an ex Ba’ath Party member (as he would have had to have been to hold a position in the Iraqi Health Ministry), and thus the data he is carrying is not really about child cancer at all. Perhaps he is involved in some sort of “Boys from Brazil” type plot to clone an army of super-soldiers from Saddam Hussein’s DNA, and for this reason the UK cannot be exposed to this deadly information for even four hours in the Heathrow transit lounge.

The alternative – that Dr Lafta is being intentionally prevented from travelling in order to hush up his research on post-war deaths (research which even the Foreign Office have now more or less given up on trying to pretend isn’t broadly accurate), or to hush up the news about paediatric cancer for political convenience – is too horrible to contemplate. I’d note that there isn’t an election on in the USA at present, so the denialist crowd can shove that little slur up their backsides this time too.

I find them too horrible to contemplate for another reason: it makes absolutely no sense. There are faxes, email, and DHL that could get the data to the conference just fine without Dr Lafta’s presence. In the comments, Mr Davies spins increasingly desperate implausible theories to explain this weird assertion. Here is the exchange:

1. So just to get this straight. Your two leading theories are A: “Boys from Brazil” or B: The US/UK are denying a passport, because without the passport Lafta can not convey the “deadly data”?

   Now your B is obviously a joke, given that he could email s-mime/sftp/tor/fax/fed-ex a dvd/etc etc the data to the UK and then video conference for whatever requires his personal apperances.

   So now lets get down to business and start figuring out where this dastardly professor is hiding his clone army…..

   Posted by jet · April 19th, 2007 at 10:51 pm

2. not necessarily at all – he might have a load of Iraqi medical records which needed to be tabulated and entered into a database, which might be difficult to achieve in Iraq at present as there is a war on.

   Posted by dsquared · April 19th, 2007 at 11:31 pm

3. daniel, so your theory is that he has a load of Iraqi medical records which need to be tabulated in the US or the UK, not in Iraq or, say, any other country in the world?

   I think we’re back to the clone army theory.

   Posted by Thomas · April 20th, 2007 at 1:20 am
4. yes, why is this so difficult to understand? Iraq is a war zone. Hospitals can’t spare time or effort for research. I can quite easily see how a load of detailed gruntwork with medical records might have to be done by the non-Iraqi authors or not done at all.
   Posted by Daniel · April 20th, 2007 at 2:10 am

Theoretically yes . . . but while I’m no scientist, my impression is that things like tabulating the basic data to test your hypothesis is usually done a leetle bit earlier than the night before your conference presenting the results. Since his general schtick involves accusing me of not understanding scientific and statistical procedure, forgive me if I chortle.

[Megan] Sorry for all the reader mail, but it’s unusually good this weekend.  A reader on the problem of publicising mass killings:

I’m sure that desire for notoriety is a factor is such killings as went on at VA Tech (especially because he sent a video to NBC), but I don’t think that’s usually a driving motivation.  The danger of over-reporting (or reporting at all) killings like this is what Cialdini calls "social proof."  In his book "Influence," Robert Cialdini details how in the time following most well-publicized suicides, the rate of motor vehicle and small aircraft crashes increase by a factor of 5.  He hypothesizes that these are actually suicides, for various reasons that I won’t go in to now.  But the point is that social proof is a powerful motivator, even in matters of life and death.  Social proof is the idea that if somebody else is doing something, it’s more likely that it’s a good idea.  You see it all the time in advertisements (anything that says "over 4 million people use our toothpaste" or other such nonsense).  So the more we publicize mass killings like at VA Tech, the more other people might think it’s a good idea and actually do it.  It’s a scary thing, and a powerful argument for limiting the amount of facetime we give to mass killers.

[Megan] On the legal system, a reader writes:

Generallly, there is a great disparity between the competency of prosecutors and public defenders, and judges in State systems versus those in the Federal system. Federal prosecutors in cities like Chicago, where I am from, Los Angeles, New York etc. are often educated at the best schools in the country and many have clerked for federal judges including Supreme Court judges.  Most of the attorneys in Chicago, when I was there, had come from lucrative jobs in the private sector but preferred the work as an Assistant United States Attorney. (In recent years however, many of the best prosecutors have left the offices throughout the United States because, for the first time in anyone’s memory, politics were injected into the system.) Our opponents in the high profile trials are often defended by the “best” defense counsel that money can buy and lose as often or more often then the federal public defenders.  The federal public defenders, like their counter parts have similar educational backgrounds and significant resources – and many federal prosecutors recognize that some of the federal defenders do a better job for their client then the high paid well known private counsel.  

 

What is true however is that at the State level there are many problems.   The prosecutors are often not as well educated, politics is the rule, they are overworked and they, like the public defenders, have limited resources.  The state system is dedicated to getting as many cases through it as possible thus the prosecutors and public defenders are not known for writing skills and write few substantive motions before, during or after a case. On the other hand, in cases of any significance, federal prosecutors and defense attorneys spend much of their time writing and responding to thoughtful motions. This is why the legal tragedies over the years emanated from the flawed systems that are found in so many states. High paid defense counsel can overwhelm a state prosecutor with motions and the state judge gives these attorneys leeway and credibility that are not warranted. Additionally public defenders must deal with prosecutors who are not there to see that justice is done but rather to win re-election. In sum the Duke case never would have been brought in federal court, OJ would have been convicted ( the judge would not have been intimidated and awed) and it is very likely all those men who have been released from death row would not have been there in the first place had any of the cases been federal cases.

[Megan] Wondering what to make of this weekend’s events in France?  We have the whole scoop over on Certain Ideas of Europe, The Economist’s new European blog. 

As I write, a panel of politicians, including Ms Royal’s partner, François Hollande (who is the Parti Socialiste’s “first secretary”, or boss) is already examining the entrails of today’s vote. Mr Hollande is pouring as much cold water as possible on the victory speech just given to his cheering supporters by Mr Sarkozy—a speech notable for its grace towards Ms Royal and for the message that “Sarko” intends to appeal to all of the French, not just those on the right.

There will, of course, be another two weeks of this, and it is entirely possible that Sarko’s wish for a battle of “ideas” with “Ségo” will evolve into a nasty battle of personalities. But in the meantime, French democracy has performed rather impressively. The turnout is said to be around four-fifths of the electorate. In my local village, the mayor chose to put the voting booths on the top floor of the mairie—but a steady stream of old ladies (proof, surely, that French women have the western world’s longest life expectancy) joined the young and fit to climb the stairs and cast their ballots for France’s future. Having witnessed not just today’s vote but also France’s 2002 election and America’s 2004 election, I have to say that Americans—who love to deride the French, and vice versa—could certainly learn a thing or two from the land of the Gauls: no hanging chads, no dodgy computer systems, no accusations of voting skulduggery. On the other hand, the discussions in the TV studios are just as interminable.

[Megan] Another reader writes in on attorneys for the poor:

The real issue and tragedy is somewhat more nuanced, but still, ultimately, comes back to the sad mathematics of class, relative privilege, and social status. Many of these folks accused of serious crimes end up hiring private attorneys—but they get what they can afford, which usually is not the high profile, exceptionally experienced trial attorney, but someone who’s WAY out of their league defending such clients. I’ve had clients literally end up hiring a private attorney at the eleventh hour because they somehow thought that paying some guy $200.00 would somehow convince the judge that they hadn’t violated their probation by being caught with yet another crack pipe, and then testing positive for cocaine, or been charged with their fourth or fifth violation of a domestic violence protective order. In such cases, these attorneys end up having their clients plead to the same thing I was going to get them—they’re just hundreds of dollars poorer for the privilege. Where the other tragedy occurs are in rural areas, where there is no effective public defender system, and the courts end up appointing a local attorney, who might otherwise be a very competent lawyer, but due to the nature of the offense, is not competent to handle such a serious crime.

A number of readers have taken issue with my characterisation of public defenders as incompetent.  Which is not quite what I mean to say.  PD offices have multiple problems:  too many cases for each attorney, no money for help to sort through records or expert witnesses or extra tests, and the leak of experienced attorneys out of the system to places that pay better.  That doesn’t mean the attorneys are bad; it means they often don’t have the resources to mount a competent defense.  Private attorneys, at the level the poor can afford, possibly even more so.  Race is a problem in the justice system, but class dominates race, which is why OJ got off, and a number of poor white defendants don’t.

[Megan] It’s not as stupid as "Now’s the time to get those atheists!" But "It’s the fault of feminism" ranks up there with "it’s the fault of the freemasons" as one of the least convincing explanations of the Virginia Tech shootings. This is a kid who seems to have been troubled since early childhood, when his mother was worried because he wouldn’t talk–in Korea, which is not known for its ultraliberal relations between the sexes. The existence of moody, disaffected loners is not some modern creation of "hook up" cultures and anomie, and nor is the violent reaction to same. The guy in the tower at the University of Texas managed to get up there long before feminism had reared its (sensibly coifed) head on the campus dating scene.

It probably is correct to say that low-status men who aren’t getting any form the recruiting pool for mass killers. But feminism hasn’t created any more of these men than there used to be. Nor do I buy the notion that it’s deprived them of opportunities for adventure and manly self expression. I had friends who took off for parts unknown after high school, which was a while ago, but not such a long while ago that I think there’s been some gigantic sea change in the feminisation of our culture. They did manly things (even the girl) like work on salmon boats, camp in odd places while doing casual labour for food money, and backpack through Tibet. They were able to do this because they were somewhat impulsive, had a taste for adventure, and were not suffering from extreme mental illness–not because life in 1990 was so much more rugged and masculine.

[Megan] In the wake of the Virginia tech murders, there has been a lot of editorialising about gun control and mental health interventions. But I haven’t found a single editorial addressing one factor we know creates these mass murders: reporting on the mass murders. In the next few weeks and months, even over the next few years, expect to see copycat killings inspired by Cho’s actions. The more saturated the media coverage, the more such events we are likely to get. But as far as I know, few papers have taken to advocating that we cut down on news coverage of these events.

To editors, of course, the costs of such a stance are obvious. Being journalists, they automatically assume that these costs outweigh the benefits. This is not, in fact, all that obvious to me. But even if it is necessary and even good that we have European journalists sticking their microphones in every student’s face to record their opinion on gun control for posterity, while American journalists piously demand to know "What was in your heart?"–even so, it seems to me that there is one obvious step the media should take, which is not reporting anything about the killer.

I don’t know how many such killers this would stop; how much of their reward is the glee of killing, and how much the notion that they will be famous for their acts? But on the margin, it has to help; after all, Cho took out time from his busy killing schedule to mail his lunatic rantings to NBC. And the cost seems to me to be trivially low. Knowing Cho’s identity, watching his video, have told the American public nothing they needed to know. The important thing is the victims; and yet, it is the madman’s name we all know. Newspapers don’t print the names of rape victims, by general agreement, so why not perform the same service in the case of shooting sprees?

A Canadian law student writes in:

You’ve identified one of the causes of wrongful convictions, but it’s also the most expensive one to fix, and probably not one of the most important. I’m a law student in Canada, and recently finished a course on wrongful convictions.  We generally have better funding for defence lawyers here, but there have still been wrongful convictions in cases involving some of the best defence lawyers in the province.

The Innocence Project has identified the causes of some of the wrongful convictions they have exposed. In 130 cases, mistaken eyewitness identification was a factor in 101 (the next most common was false confessions, which were a factor in 35). Most wrongful convictions happen with a competent defence lawyer and an ethical prosecutor. But that won’t be much help to a wrongfully accused person in a case with a false confession and mistaken eyewitness identification.

Don’t get me wrong, insufficient funding for public defenders is a huge problem, but there are some even easier solutions to bigger problems. One change, which has been adopted already in many parts of Canada, is showing photo line-ups to accused one photograph at a time, which reduces the chance of a witness guessing the photo that looks most like the person they remember. Wrongful confessions are less likely to occur if police videotape interrogations (all of it, not just after a suspect starts confessing). Those are just two easy, and cheap, steps that would reduce the danger of wrongful convictions.

[Ross] Here’s the story. Here’s my take, from a year ago, when it first looked like this document was in the works. (The Vatican moves sloooowly.)

And as always, don’t listen to Richard P. McBrien.

Mons, Belgium, 10 am.